Currently, homes in North America either depend on cable systems to deliver entertainment programs, or they use an antenna or a satellite dish to receive broadcast television signals. The trend is such that the cable industry will ultimately be connected to about 85-90% of the homes in the United States.
Present practice in most cable systems is to place an interface on each television receiver that is connected to the system. The interface descrambles protected programs. The interface, in its present implementations, creates difficulties for the consumer who wants to use certain features. In particular, it may be difficult to time-shift and record scrambled programs because the VCR cannot control the descrambler.
The cable industry is presently in the process of investigating new technology to increase the number of programs that can be delivered to the home. This is being done via two technologically strategic moves. The first is to increase the bandwidth of the cable plant to 1 GHz (which provides for 150 6 MHz channels). The second is to use video compression to carry up to 10 programs in one 6 MHz wide channel. Typical numbers that are used in the industry are about 500 programs can be delivered to the home in such a fashion.
Obviously, it is a considerable problem for subscribers to search through 500 channels to find a program they wish to watch. Therefore, these new systems will have electronic menus that present the programming on the system in easy-to-read on-screen menus. This menuing system will have its own remote control to provide cursor control for easy selection of a program.
Some advanced systems, such as the Starsight product made by Insight Systems, now being brought to market increase the sophistication of the remote controller so that it becomes a video cassette recorder (VCR) programmer at a system level: when an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) signals that a desired program is starting, it turns on the VCR, sets it to record, turns on the descrambler and tunes it to the correct channel. If the program is being delivered in compressed fashion, the video decompressor is turned on and tuned to the correct program in the correct channel. In the case where there are multiple television receivers in the home connected to the cable system, each receiver is desirably equipped with an EPG remote control.
Other businesses are competing with the cable industry in delivering entertainment and other services to U.S. homes. The telephone companies ("TELCOS"), for example, have announced their intentions, as have at least two companies which have announced that they will deliver entertainment services via Direct Broadcast Satellite ("DBS"). Each of these delivery services would also broadcast its own EPG, possibly using different transmission protocols. In addition, there are companies competing with Starsight such as TV Guide On-line.
One patent known in this field is U.S. Pat. No. 4,751,578 issued to Reiter et al. This patent is directed to an electronic television programming information display system which enables the user to control the format and content of that display. The main components of the system, as shown in FIG. 2, include microcontroller 60, mixer 70, and program schedule information receiving means 67. In the presently developing environment of program service providers, however, the Reiter et al. system is limited because Reiter only receives a single source of program schedule information.
Some of the potential problems that may be encountered when these systems are used are: 1) each service will have to have its own terminal on each TV, 2) the subscriber will have to choose the correct remote control to operate a particular services' program guide, and 3) each service program guide may use a different user interface protocol (e.g., highlight and click, enter a number, etc.) for function selection.